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Tagging Your Sounds

This is a no-brainer. When uploading your tracks to SoundCloud it’s worth remembering that tagging will instantly enhance your search ranking and visibility on the platform. By using relevant and effective tags you can get more exposure to the community, more listens and more favourites.

This isn’t limited to exposure in Search either; in future discovery developments we’ll be utilizing tags to help users explore new and related sounds on the platform, so keep that in mind.

Below, we’ve listed out a handful of useful guidelines, in order of importance, to ensure you’re using metadata in an effective way and tagging your sounds correctly…

Keep it clean: unless it’s necessary, avoid putting things like artist name in the track title. If an artist name needs to be used (you’re a label uploading the track to your own account) then it should be clearly separated from the track title by a hypen.

Fill out out the genre field: try to use established genres and not something like “mysupercoolwobblebaserock.” Sub-genres, for example “deep house” or “post hardcore”, are fine. Potential listeners can browse tracks by genre on SoundCloud, adding in relevant and popular genres will help them locate your sounds.

Add as many tags as possible: try and do this without spamming your sounds with tags, for example, adding tags that are totally unrelated.
With music, tags should be about production, think linear notes: recording location, label, release, instruments and so on. Additional genre information is also good, but it should be distinct. As an example, “electronic” and “techno” is fine but the separation of “deep” and “house” is less useful as “deep house” is usually what is searched for. To explore the range of popular tags on SoundCloud click here.

Make use of the description: don’t forget that the track description can be used to go into detail about your track rather than trying to describe it using tags. We’ve seen a couple of great examples recently from Alt-J, who utilized the description to promote ticket links and the band’s social channels, and from Chromatics who used this section to describe the entire writing and recording process behind their tracks.

Add any other information: key bits of information such as BPM are helpful too.